


Your Name is Locus (Maybe)

by Koruga



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Character Study, Gen, pretty much everyone outside of Locus is incidental
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 14:37:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8331532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koruga/pseuds/Koruga
Summary: You don't know if you have a name any more. You had a name when you were a human. You had a name when you were a soldier. You don't think monsters have the privilege of an individual name.
 
A delve into the life of a man who used to be a soldier, and before that, a human.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a previous work of mine, Your Name is Felix, which was written before season 14. This one's more canon compliant, and I may end up making a companion piece for Felix that's more in line with what we know about the pair now. My end goal for making this was just to make a backstory for Locus that I could use that didn't entirely excuse his actions, but did give them a reason.
> 
> I'd like to thank RiverDelta for reading over the fic and giving me invaluable feedback. You're the bomb, friend.

Your name is Locus.

 

No it's not.

 

Your name is Samuel Ortez.

 

That's not right, either.

 

You don't know if you have a name any more. You had a name when you were a human. You had a name when you were a soldier. You don't think monsters have the privilege of an individual name.

You suppose you don't need one.

When you were twelve, your name was Sammy and you lived on Hathor-Sekhmet with your dad and his mother. You stayed quiet in school in most matters, walked your dog every day, and had a grand total of two friends — Stanley Morgan and Isabel Garcia. They were nice enough, you guessed, and they played backgammon and chess and checkers with you and didn't mind that you always picked the same colour and got visibly frustrated when you weren't allowed.

Your dog's name was Eliza and she died when you were fifteen, run over by a truck when she got off her leash during an evening walk. Your dad said it wasn't your fault, but you let her chase after a fly and let go, just for a minute. That was the first time you'd really seen death first-hand, and you went home that night and didn't say a word for three days.

When you were eighteen, your name was Private Ortez, and you were given a position fighting against the Covenant under Sergeant Cooper. He classified you as cannon fodder a day after you were put under his command, and shoved you into a partnership with the second private he wouldn't mind seeing shot — Gates. 

You and Private Gates managed to down seven of those Sangheili when the pair of you were isolated from the rest of the squad, a few months after your first assignment. Sergeant Cooper stopped thinking of you as useless when you came back with three alien guns and a still-disgustedly-gagging Gates, complaining that he never wanted to see the inside of anything's stomach again.

Cooper's confidence in you waned again when the squad captured a lone alien. It was terrified, it was so incredibly scared, it didn't know what was happening and you could feel the panic coursing through it and into you and you argued so desperately to let it go, not to torture it unduly, until you were demoted to object.

You turned nineteen two weeks after that, and your name was still Ortez but your designation was simply Locus, or SAW, or whatever piece of equipment your commanding officer felt like pretending you were. You were Lortez to Reyes and Singh, Private to Yelchin and Hassan when she felt like lording her rank over you, Locs to Gates and Samuel to Wu.

Around when you were twenty one, Lortez became Lord Pez, and Gates joined in on the fun. You took it in stride, only snapping twice at your squadmates for it, both times when they bought the ancient candy on leave and began using it as a prop. They stopped for a few weeks after you broke Singh's nose, before starting again at Gates's lead and laughing and telling you that they were laughing with you, not at you.

You never understood what that meant, when you weren't laughing at all, but you didn't tell them that they weren't doing it right. It stopped within the year, when Reyes caught a grenade in the face and the originator of the nickname stopped keeping pulse. Reyes's feet, trained as a child to be a gymnast, stopped spinning around, as did their pistol when Cooper wasn't around to berate them.

The galaxy kept on spinning without Sien Reyes and you were twenty four when your name was Samuel Ortez again, when you were Sam because that's what you were called when your name was Samuel like how Roberts were Rob and Williams were Will. Wu Mason Osiris Oh, Siris and Gates his name is Isaac and Sin-Sunil those three settled in the city of Arkhangelsk Nobirsk just inside the Centauri system with you, a few dozen minutes away from you because this was the first port they let you off at and you just mechanically walked out of the hangar when you landed.

You tried to work. You didn't want to sit on what you'd been given from the army, you looked for work and people gave it to you because you were strong and built to do work. You worked in construction for a day and a half before drills became bullets and you ceased to exist for an eternity and three minutes. After that, you worked inside, tried to use your mind instead of your body, but the world was too small inside, too many choke points and places you could get trapped in. After five months, you stopped working at all, you stopped having a purpose for existing and then Isaac Gates Isaac came to you with a proposal and named you Locus again, a special name for special occasions.

You were allowed to stop being a person when a job came around. You were allowed to simply point and shoot, allowed to intimidate and talk a little as possible, and you did it for the right reasons. That's what Felix said, Felix who still called himself Isaac and messed up and called you Sam when you were on jobs together. He assured you that this way your messed up head could focus on what it did best, and that this way nobody could keep you down. You could do what you were made for.

Slowly, somewhere along the line, you switched from tranquillisers to lead.

You hadn't made the decision, but you'd considered it. When Felix brought it up, you mentioned how easy it was to shoot only to maim, and not to kill. Siris turned a blind eye whenever you missed the non-vital parts.

Later on, you started accepting jobs from non-law enforcement.

Sometimes the people you fought called you crazy. You made sure they regretted that. You weren't crazy, you were sane as you had ever been, and Felix always whistled his approval when you beat them unconscious or put a bullet in their brain.

Eventually, you began to accept jobs from anyone at all.

"You." It was never you who picked the jobs. It was Siris at first, carefully filing through wanted reports and asking the police casually about criminals in between his family life and keeping you and Felix from ripping each other's throats out. When he left, took his kids with his wife and travelled halfway across the galaxy to the developing colony on Thaumiel, Felix took up his mantle, picking and choosing anything that paid enough, in money or in objects. 

Felix took a job on Chorus when you were twenty seven and he promised you one just like it if you gave him six months. It was a job from the mysterious "Control" who had commissioned you on a few jobs before — an assassination of some former special ops guys, a project gone wrong, so you could steal some of their tech. This time, the job was a little bigger. Kill a planet.

You burned down Samuel Ortez, and you were just Locus. Just soldier.

The galaxy spun, and you grew into your armour. You stopped taking it off after missions, and civilians started to do the same when they realised there was no middle ground in the war any more, not now that both sides had called in highly skilled mercenaries to get the job done. You became a husk, a shell, a gun. A soldier.

If you admitted to having any emotions left, it might have been a relief.

Felix reminded you that this was all for the mission. That this was what you wanted, to be an object, that this was the only way your broken brain would ever be satisfied, when you were doing one thing, and doing it well. You weren't useless any more. You didn't have the words to argue with him any more.

Then, when you were thirty four, the Blood Gulch troopers and their Freelancer mentor crash landed on the planet. You watched them. You took them into the custody of the Federal Army. You watched them grow to trust the army, and you by extension. Then you tried to kill them.

And then you failed, time and time again. You failed your mission. You were worthless to Control if the job was a failure, so you kept going, egged on all the time by your tireless partner. God, he hated protocol, but only when it was holding him back. Only when he wasn't allowed to do what he wanted.

You should have seen it sooner.

The soldiers you thought you knew, the Agents Washington and Maine and Texas of Freelancer, they didn't want to be simply soldiers. They weren't right in the head. They wanted to be human beings, regular people instead of what they were clearly meant to do. It was ridiculous. You thought you knew these people and their motivations.

You tried to prove you were a true soldier. You saw your fears.

You came out with something to prove, and you were proven wrong.

When the time came, and you had the chance to end everything, you failed to kill the last Freelancer agents.

Your cavalry was destroyed, and your partner denounced protocol for good.

He didn't care about being a soldier. He cared about himself. He kept you like a dog on a leash because he knew what you were and knew that he had to keep it from you.

So you became a monster, and killed the last person who could pretend to care about you. Maybe it should have been cathartic. Or depressing. Maybe you should have felt something, but you didn't.

You were still just a shell, after all.

So you went your own way. So you decided to burn down your past and your mistakes and start again. So you went through hell and high water, braved your worst nightmares, and then came back.

Congratulations. Do you want to take the test again?


End file.
